


Shoulda Been a Welder

by amythis



Category: Laverne & Shirley (TV)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-07 15:53:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26690206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amythis/pseuds/amythis
Summary: Pia Kosnowski wasn't meant to be a mother.  Set in 1943 and 1973.
Comments: 11
Kudos: 2





	Shoulda Been a Welder

She stares at him as he pulls up his pants and says, "Well, Babe, this was fun, but I gotta be getting home."

"But, Helmie, I thought we was running off together!"

"We did, all the way to Chicago. But now it's time for me to get home to the wife and kiddies."

She'll later replay every word he ever said to her, the flirtations and promises, realizing he never said forever. At this moment, she thinks of the man who offered her a lifetime when she told him of the life she carried inside her. So she blurts out, "But I sent my husband a Dear John letter!"

"I thought his name was Stefan."

She doesn't explain, because it's sinking in that her lover didn't leave a farewell note for his nagging wife and he'll go back to her and the two little brats, the spoiled three-year-old daughter and the tantrum-prone son who's a few months older than Pia's son, as if Helmut has simply been away overnight on business. She left on Lenny's fifth birthday, telling him she had to go get candles for his cake, and the stupid, trusting little boy, with Stefan's warm blue eyes, fell for it. Ten-year-old Sofia wouldn't have, but she was out with her best friend Mary Swenson, collecting scrap metal for the war effort.

It occurs to her that Stefan, who's stationed in Germany, might not make it home, meaning, one, his parents and the kids would never know about her letter, and two, she'd be obligated to go home. But she can't give up on her first chance of freedom, and maybe she'll be freer without the company of Helmut Squiggman.

"What does it matter what the jerk's name is as long as I never see him again?"

"Hey, listen, Kitten, if you're gettin' a divorce, you can't name me as a correspondence."

"Don't worry, Helmie, I'll be out of your life, everybody's life."

He turns serious for once, while not letting go of his ego. "Pia, even I ain't worth killing yaself over."

She laughs scornfully. "Don't flatter yaself! I'm just running off, further off, where nobody can ever find me."

This unshockable man looks shocked. "What about your kids?"

"I never shoulda been a mother." She almost adds, "I shoulda been a welder," but she knows he'd laugh. Lately, her dreams of living in blissful sin with the neighbor who made cocktails, sang and danced to Big Band music on the radio with her, and copped feels, all in her tiny kitchen as she reluctantly cooked barely edible meals for her kids, have alternated with Rosie the Riveter fantasies of working in a factory. But the Kosnowskis are old-fashioned and don't think women, especially women with children, should work. "Stefan's mutter can look after the kids, raise 'em if he never comes back."

She can see it, Babcia Kosnowski trying to fatten up the two skinny orphans with kielbasa and mazurek, Dziadek Kosnowski working even harder as a tailor, telling those crazy stories about being a Polish count, fifty-fifth in line for the throne. Never mind that Poland is under Hitler's thumb, despite the best efforts of their only child, Szczepan, the thirty-year-old corporal and Baron of Szarpie (Polish for "lint.") Pia can also see them telling her children what a bad woman she is, maybe even dropping hints that she'd had to get married and they're not even sure Sofia is really their granddaughter, although they love Fia anyway.

Pia knows she's bad. She learned that when God gave both her parents the Spanish flu. The lesson was reinforced at the orphanage and at the foster homes, where she got called a dirty, dumb Polack, and worse. She, whose filthy mouth Helmut loves to kiss, still can't even think about what her last foster father called her, when she told him she was going to have a baby. She can still feel the slap as he told her that he would kill her if she told her "sainted foster mother." She thought about killing herself but it was a less desperate act to throw herself on the mercy of the gangly neighbor boy with big dreams and a job at the fish cannery in the depths of the Great Depression. Stefan was good to her. He didn't run around on her and he hardly ever hit her. But she still felt trapped and she sometimes took it out on the kids, especially their clingy little boy.

"Well, I guess it's your life," her now former lover says, putting on his zoot suit jacket. He gives her a tongue kiss goodbye and then with a "Here's looking at you, Kid," he's out the motel door, leaving her to figure out where to go from here.

....

She watches the _Tonight Show_ interview on the television over the bar. Although she's pushing sixty, she still fits in the waitress uniform, still gets hit on by admittedly drunk customers. She doesn't sleep alone unless she wants to, and she mostly pays her own way.

She did find factory work, not in Chicago, which was too close to Milwaukee, but in Allentown. All the women were let go after the War, so she wandered from one town, one job, to the next, before ending up here at some point in the '60s, when she was just another blonde in go-go boots. It wasn't easy, with no high school diploma and no roots, but she got by. And she never let herself get trapped again.

She knows that that's her boy up there, all grown up and almost middle-aged. He hasn't changed that ridiculous last name and takes pride in his Polish heritage. He's got her hair, his father's build and eyes. And he's musical like her, although she never tried to make a living from it.

Johnny Carson teases Lenny about his love life, how he's never married, then jokes about himself being on his third marriage. Pia knows that Johnny won't bring up that Lenny is supposedly an orphan, although other interviewers have. She understands. She might as well be dead to her children, and they're better off that way. She doesn't understand why Helmut Squiggman once popped back up into his son's life twenty years after walking out, four years after she left Milwaukee for good.

But then he doesn't understand why she never divorced Stefan. "Was that a Catholic thing?" he asked when he stumbled into the bar a few years back.

She couldn't explain that she didn't want to pay for a divorce and she figured Stefan could do something about it if he wanted to remarry, as Helmut's wife finally did. And then Stefan died, peacefully in his sleep, when the kids were both in their twenties, so it didn't matter anymore.

Even before Lenny became famous, his mother knew what was going on his life, and Sofia's, because Myrtle Swenson told her. Pia ended up writing to Mary's mother, swearing her to secrecy and then, when Lenny and his friends moved to California, Mary took over for Myrtle. She worked as a waitress, too, not in a bar but in restaurants run by the father of the girl Lenny liked who only saw him as a friend. Anyway, Mary moved from Milwaukee to Burbank and filled Pia in, keeping the secret as faithfully as her mother had.

"What's the toughest thing about being an overnight success?"

"How long it took," Lenny says, making Johnny, the studio audience, and the barflies laugh without trying.

Pia knows he'll be OK, and he never really needed her anyway.


End file.
